Our local news radio describes a city under flood warning as the rain pours in this morning.

A moment ago the water let up a little, and I walked my half acre, dragging green-speckled limbs off the lawn and into the woods.

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Rain – the poet’s metaphor for sexual passion, for renewal after spiritual dryness, for letting go.

Also, in its aspect of gray and fog and subdual, just the opposite — life shut in, repression, imperception.

But in a new landscape, a postmodern one, rain seems to mean something else. It plays differently.

As in a poem like The Center for Atmospheric Research by Bin Ramke.

Like Don DeLillo, Ramke notices how pleasantly, and disturbingly, our smooth affluent American lives seem to be arranged for us. Everything’s prettied up, turned into pleasant, managed, mini-experience. Maybe pseudo-experience. In a small moment in The Names, Don DeLillo’s narrator, James Axton, describes heading to bed with his family, “our bodies arranged for dreaming in loose-fitting clothes.” Arranged. Some invisible benevolent life-manager has chosen those clothes carefully for us, has arranged even our unconscious experience for us. Into even our dreams, our most wild and hidden and personal aspect, some sedating, neutralizing stage manager has intruded.

Ramke’s poem — a surreal stroll through a postmodern weatherscape — extends this idea of the managed life, the managed consciousness, closely escorted through a pretty, though unsettlingly shrunken and simulacral world.

The poet is visiting an I.M. Pei designed lab for the study of the weather.

Pei designed the building with views,
smooth masonry, and the mountains aligned
for a photo opportunity; inside are files
sufficient for forever, for fine tuning weather.

The elaborately designed building, aligning the mountains (we align them; we bring nature into our design, our arrangement, thereby making nature feel unnatural); the files that fine tune the weather — from the outset, the theme is this DeLilloesque sense of a world entirely tamed and patterned by us.

Great Spangled Fritillary, the watcher vaguely recalls
from Teach Yourself Lepidoptery, a book.
He wanted to live in a land of appropriate weather
with views of mountains and with music constant.

And, you know, why not? Who wouldn’t want to live in a climate-controlled universe? Weather always appropriate, soft carefully chosen elevator music in the background… See how far we are from the Romantic notion of weather as the power outside and greater than we, the power that makes a mockery of our efforts to control the world. Now we control – interiorize, in the Center – even the power of weather.

He wants to tell a story but no one would listen,
like opera: Black women clean the floors
and shine the walls like silver nightly.
Computers whir Platonic as nuns. Nothing

escapes naming; storms arranged in teacups
like anyone’s collection, like rows of butterflies
pinned and satisfactory: this is the new landscape.

Let me tell you how being in this place feels to me. The telling will be surreal, and you won’t listen, becalmed inside your own version of climate control. But this weird technological world around me is almost spiritual in its hushed perfection, in the way the setting creates an autonomous and satisfying and ordered world whose power and tranquility make me never want to leave it. Everything is named here, arranged. No mystery, no anxious unknowing.

Also, though, dead. Pinned. The new landscape.

Now, as the poet continues his walk through the atmospheric exhibits, his thoughts take a bizarre turn.

Or there is a lewd father among the shrubbery

watching daughters in weather; he breathes heavily
and the wet wisdom begins, the storm gathering
to spill across the ridge, longed for.
Daughters must be warned against sincerity

of frantic violins: “He was a man of sympathetic
tendencies,” read the official report. “He was
smaller than he looked and tended to lick chocolate
from his fingers in a lascivious manner.”

He tried his wife’s patience, it is true,
and lived alone through the marriage, kept
his own counsel. With such petty symbols as
weather, he kept his own counsel.

So, the poet begins to imagine a narrative, in some way inspired by what he’s seeing, a kind of louche fairy tale in which an infantile voyeur masturbates while watching his own daughters as they stand out in an approaching rainstorm. The storm gathering… longed for… This is a perverse and pathetic endpoint for the sweeping Romantic narrative, the great thunderous sublime which ignited the lovers’ passion. Here bracing weather generates merely wet spill from a childish, solitary, small, and petty man.

A butterfly like weather; the climate like
laughter, the movement of small air. Clouds, too,
have names. Clouds leave home to find themselves.
Good money after bad, the fathers say, and close

the door called Nature against their coming back.
The funny little ways children have of making
the world the color they always wanted. Sunset.
Birds.

Again this theme of our infantile desire to condense and control the world, to shut nature out so that the unclarity and uncontrollability of clouds no longer threatens us. The clouds inside the Center are pseudo-clouds, named, pinned, like the butterflies. Like children, we make the world whatever color we want.

The poem concludes:

The mathematics of memory begin

to swirl like cookie dough, like chocolate with egg
and sugar and vanilla and butter. A bowl to lick,
dangerous with delight, as ultraviolet. Home again!
begs the mother and soon the sorry child walks

that long allée as rain begins to pour. Past
such petty symbols the boy returns through architecture,
a silly gauntlet: the butterfly, the mother, the fit
signatures of loveliness. His parents at the door,

the little cottage in the woods, Hansel home again
at last, the shining path. A little like a dream.
Ours is not a simple age, and things are what they seem
happily ever after in the malicious tiny rain.

Like the malsain father, the poet now recalls his similarly infantile childhood – sickly sweet, with much licking of chocolate icing, everything sweet comfort food, like this lab which reduces everything dangerous in the world to sweet comfort food. Indeed the lab’s unnatural infantility has prompted these infantile memories…

But now the poet admonishes himself – or rather his mother admonishes him – to leave the petty indoor weather world, to return to reality, to grow up, to go home.

Sorry to leave it, the child walks home, as “the rain begins to pour.” So this finally feels like reality — this is real rain falling, the real, grown-up, confused, out of control business of being an actual person in the actual world. As he walks back out through the lab, the poet again registers “the fit / signatures of loveliness,” the appropriate, arranged, satisfactory landscape of postmodern dreaming in which he’s been delighting.

And now home again for Hansel, lost but now found, back on the real path… It was all a dream…

Yet note the last two lines (note too that the poem does not rhyme except for this last stanza, which suddenly has exact rhyme):

Ours is not a simple age, and things are what they seem
happily ever after in the malicious tiny rain.

Despite its seeming infantility, our new postmodern landscape is not at all simple. It only looks simple, and benign. In fact, the cute little pseudo-rains inside the lab, all those adorably controlled exhibits we enjoy as we stroll by them in the science museum, seduce us into a very perilous ease about things. Outside the pretend rain, under the massive pelting of the actual, we’re shaken awake.